Saturday, March 25, 2017

National Security and Military Legitimacy: When Might Must Be Right

By Rudy
Barnes, Jr.

Military
power is the hard power that complements the softer powers of foreign policy to
promote and protect U.S. national security interests. When the legitimacy of U.S. military power
depends on public support in the area of operations—as it does in the Islamic
nations of the Middle East—large numbers of U.S. combat forces can make that public
support elusive.

Standards
of legitimacy in Islamic nations differ from those in the U.S. For example, the freedoms of religion and
speech are precluded by apostasy and blasphemy laws, and women and non-Muslims
are denied equal protection of the law; and since non-Muslims are considered
infidels in Islamic nations, a large U.S. military presence can undermine the public
support and legitimacy needed to achieve strategic political objectives.

Following
the brief combat phase of military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq,
military operations evolved into counterinsurgency operations (COIN), in which
U.S. political objectives became paramount.
Those objectives have depended more on public perceptions of legitimacy
than on military might, and that has necessitated a drawdown of U.S. combat
forces.

Unlike
COIN, counterterrorist operations (CT) involve military strikes or raids
against terrorists. They are brief in
duration and conducted by small contingents of special operations forces or
drones; but like COIN, excessive force in CT can cause collateral damage that
can turn an otherwise successful military raid into a political defeat.

Military
might must be right when U.S.
national security objectives require public support. Lethal force must be restrained to avoid the
collateral damage that undermines public perceptions of military legitimacy,
and military operations must be closely coordinated with other elements of U.S.
foreign policy to build the public support needed for mission success.

The
U.S. has the most powerful military forces in the world, but overwhelming
military force can never be a substitute for political legitimacy—and it is
often lacking in governments in the Middle East and Africa. To protect vital U.S. national security
interests in those regions, diplomat
warriors are needed to work closely with indigenous forces and U.S.
civilian resources to deny insurgent forces the legitimacy they need to recruit
followers and succeed.

President
Trump’s call to “start winning wars again” by spending more for conventional
military weaponry and combat operations and cutting the State Department budget
for foreign assistance is wrong-headed. The
protection of U.S. national security interests requires a national strategy to
identify threats and the military capabilities and operations needed to counter
them.

Before President Trump’s first
address to Congress, his national security advisor, General H. R. McMaster,
reportedly advised him to “describe the battle against The Islamic State and
al-Qaeda as a global and generational war that the U.S. should fight in
partnership with its Muslim allies.”
Trump ignored McMaster’s advice and asserted an America First national strategy that was more focused on nation
destruction than nation building in Islamic cultures.

Radical Islamist terrorism is a
major threat to U.S. national security.
To counter that threat the U.S. must provide
military aid and security assistance to Islamic nations. Only Muslims can undermine the legitimacy of
radical Islamism. It is the religious
ideal that drives Islamist terrorism.
President Trump’s defense and budget proposals ignore that reality as well as other lessons learned in legitimacy, jeopardizing U.S. national
security and military legitimacy.